A Malevolent Apparatus

They, Robot

19

JAN/12

Mission 23:

It has been some months. Business had been slow but steady for the AST. Specs had been working with the military, and Stavian ran the AST. Delic had not been seen in awhile, nor had Damien or Scratch. There were some new faces. Ullern (“Zap”) was their employer for mission 11; there were some unsavory-types out to kill him, and he needed to lie low. Franco had been hired after another mission.

On this day, their client was an upper-middleclass gentleman. He had purchased a servant robot, and now that robot had disappeared, along with his fine tea set. They were to be recovered. Specs, Stavian, Claire, Zap, and Franco arrived at the apartment building, only to find many other tenants with missing items (and robots). Further investigation led them to the showroom (“Babbages”) where the robots were sold, to the manufacturer, then to a warehouse. In the warehouse, the robots were being “decommissioned” by a bunch of thugs; the AST disrupted their activities and had the leader arrested. It was revealed that the thug leader was destroying the robots on behalf of the manufacturer, who was aware of a problem with the robots but didn’t want the word getting out to the public. They also found another robot, badly damaged, that was slowly dragging itself to another location. They let this robot go so they could follow it later.

Shortly afterward, the AST headed over to the Opera house, where they found two robots had gone haywire and into a killing spree. They disabled one of the robots, and the other make its escape across the rooftops. That robot jumped down to street level, where it was captured and stuffed into a carriage. Zap teleported onto the carriage to follow it; it went to the manufacturer.

The AST then picked up the trail of the damaged robot. It went into the slums and into a run-down apartment building. When the AST went inside, they found a room with a visualization apparatus (a sort of half-arcane half-mechanica “virtual reality” that people typically used to enhance their drug high). Stavian bravely hooked in, and saw a robot in the VR. It was later determined the apartment owner was a former Babbage’s employee, and the VR machine was aiding him in reprogramming the robots in order to give them a bad name.

The tea set was recovered, and the knowledge of the malfunctioning robots was passed along to the police, greatly setting back any plans for the manufacturer to introduce a “police” bot.